No Arabic abstract
Multimodal VAEs seek to model the joint distribution over heterogeneous data (e.g. vision, language), whilst also capturing a shared representation across such modalities. Prior work has typically combined information from the modalities by reconciling idiosyncratic representations directly in the recognition model through explicit products, mixtures, or other such factorisations. Here we introduce a novel alternative, the MEME, that avoids such explicit combinations by repurposing semi-supervised VAEs to combine information between modalities implicitly through mutual supervision. This formulation naturally allows learning from partially-observed data where some modalities can be entirely missing -- something that most existing approaches either cannot handle, or do so to a limited extent. We demonstrate that MEME outperforms baselines on standard metrics across both partial and complete observation schemes on the MNIST-SVHN (image-image) and CUB (image-text) datasets. We also contrast the quality of the representations learnt by mutual supervision against standard approaches and observe interesting trends in its ability to capture relatedness between data.
The large amount of audiovisual content being shared online today has drawn substantial attention to the prospect of audiovisual self-supervised learning. Recent works have focused on each of these modalities separately, while others have attempted to model both simultaneously in a cross-modal fashion. However, comparatively little attention has been given to leveraging one modality as a training objective to learn from the other. In this work, we propose Learning visual speech Representations from Audio via self-supervision (LiRA). Specifically, we train a ResNet+Conformer model to predict acoustic features from unlabelled visual speech. We find that this pre-trained model can be leveraged towards word-level and sentence-level lip-reading through feature extraction and fine-tuning experiments. We show that our approach significantly outperforms other self-supervised methods on the Lip Reading in the Wild (LRW) dataset and achieves state-of-the-art performance on Lip Reading Sentences 2 (LRS2) using only a fraction of the total labelled data.
Almost all neural architecture search methods are evaluated in terms of performance (i.e. test accuracy) of the model structures that it finds. Should it be the only metric for a good autoML approach? To examine aspects beyond performance, we propose a set of criteria aimed at evaluating the core of autoML problem: the amount of human intervention required to deploy these methods into real world scenarios. Based on our proposed evaluation checklist, we study the effectiveness of a random search strategy for fully automated multimodal neural architecture search. Compared to traditional methods that rely on manually crafted feature extractors, our method selects each modality from a large search space with minimal human supervision. We show that our proposed random search strategy performs close to the state of the art on the AV-MNIST dataset while meeting the desirable characteristics for a fully automated design process.
The task of the emotion recognition in the wild (EmotiW) Challenge is to assign one of seven emotions to short video clips extracted from Hollywood style movies. The videos depict acted-out emotions under realistic conditions with a large degree of variation in attributes such as pose and illumination, making it worthwhile to explore approaches which consider combinations of features from multiple modalities for label assignment. In this paper we present our approach to learning several specialist models using deep learning techniques, each focusing on one modality. Among these are a convolutional neural network, focusing on capturing visual information in detected faces, a deep belief net focusing on the representation of the audio stream, a K-Means based bag-of-mouths model, which extracts visual features around the mouth region and a relational autoencoder, which addresses spatio-temporal aspects of videos. We explore multiple methods for the combination of cues from these modalities into one common classifier. This achieves a considerably greater accuracy than predictions from our strongest single-modality classifier. Our method was the winning submission in the 2013 EmotiW challenge and achieved a test set accuracy of 47.67% on the 2014 dataset.
We investigate a strategy for improving the efficiency of contrastive learning of visual representations by leveraging a small amount of supervised information during pre-training. We propose a semi-supervised loss, SuNCEt, based on noise-contrastive estimation and neighbourhood component analysis, that aims to distinguish examples of different classes in addition to the self-supervised instance-wise pretext tasks. On ImageNet, we find that SuNCEt can be used to match the semi-supervised learning accuracy of previous contrastive approaches while using less than half the amount of pre-training and compute. Our main insight is that leveraging even a small amount of labeled data during pre-training, and not only during fine-tuning, provides an important signal that can significantly accelerate contrastive learning of visual representations. Our code is available online at github.com/facebookresearch/suncet.
Recently, substantial research efforts in Deep Metric Learning (DML) focused on designing complex pairwise-distance losses, which require convoluted schemes to ease optimization, such as sample mining or pair weighting. The standard cross-entropy loss for classification has been largely overlooked in DML. On the surface, the cross-entropy may seem unrelated and irrelevant to metric learning as it does not explicitly involve pairwise distances. However, we provide a theoretical analysis that links the cross-entropy to several well-known and recent pairwise losses. Our connections are drawn from two different perspectives: one based on an explicit optimization insight; the other on discriminative and generative views of the mutual information between the labels and the learned features. First, we explicitly demonstrate that the cross-entropy is an upper bound on a new pairwise loss, which has a structure similar to various pairwise losses: it minimizes intra-class distances while maximizing inter-class distances. As a result, minimizing the cross-entropy can be seen as an approximate bound-optimization (or Majorize-Minimize) algorithm for minimizing this pairwise loss. Second, we show that, more generally, minimizing the cross-entropy is actually equivalent to maximizing the mutual information, to which we connect several well-known pairwise losses. Furthermore, we show that various standard pairwise losses can be explicitly related to one another via bound relationships. Our findings indicate that the cross-entropy represents a proxy for maximizing the mutual information -- as pairwise losses do -- without the need for convoluted sample-mining heuristics. Our experiments over four standard DML benchmarks strongly support our findings. We obtain state-of-the-art results, outperforming recent and complex DML methods.